In 2005, Steve Jobs gave a speech at Stanford University's graduation. I wasn't at Stanford's graduation that year, but I was asked to watch this speech last year in English and write my response to it. It was the first time I had heard Jobs' speech, and although it was intended to inspire an audience of college graduates, I was directing some of that inspiration toward myself, as a soon-to-be high school graduate. Many aspects of his speech were inspiring, but a few struck me more than others. To begin his speech, Jobs tells the audience that he is going to tell them three stories: one about connecting the dots, the second about love and loss, and the third about death. From each of these stories, I learned something inspiring. Say no to plagiarism. Get a custom essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get an original essay The first connect-the-dots story struck me as ironic because in it Jobs talks about how he dropped out of college six months after the beginning of his studies. first year despite the fact that he is speaking to a group of graduates from a very expensive and prestigious university. He says he did it because he didn't see the value in it and didn't want to continue wasting his parents' money. Then he's going to say that he stayed another eighteen months taking classes that actually interested him before he really stopped, to the point that you should always follow your curiosity. After dropping out of a calligraphy class, he explains that Macintoshes had beautiful fonts, just like all the other personal computers that came after him. From this story, I found Jobs' underlying message of always following your curiosity very inspiring and I have taken this into account in my own life. I thought he was saying that if you pursue what interests you, you will eventually succeed. In his second story about love and loss, he talks about his firing from Apple, the company he created and built. He says: "...what had been the center of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating...I felt like I had let down the previous generation of entrepreneurs, that I had let down the relay as he passed the baton to me. » (Jobs, 2005). He goes on to explain that after this disappointment, he created Pixar, which was later purchased by Apple. He had persevered while losing everything he worked for, and ended up on top anyway because of it. Not only did I find Jobs' perseverance in the story inspiring, but also his use of a metaphor to drop the baton. This made his situation very relatable to any audience because everyone can understand the feeling that must come from it. Finally, in his third story about death, Jobs explains how he once read a quote about how he should live each day as if it were his last, and so he did. He then spoke about his cancer diagnosis and how he survived, but now had a better understanding that any day could be his last. Towards the end of his story, he tells the audience: "Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life... Don't let the noise of other people's opinions drown out your inner voice, and above all, have the courage to follow your heart and your intuition, they already know what you really want to become, everything else is secondary” (Jobs, 2005). The statement itself inspired me, but his call to action for the audience to follow this advice in their lives was an inspiration to all. He brought the audience.